Download Drug price deals are not political footballs

Drug price deals are not political footballs
Jeremiah Norris
Updated on Aug 03, 2007
Last week's meeting of the International Aids Society, in Sydney, was another measure of how the global fight against
HIV/Aids is falling short. Despite US$31 billion spent since 2003, infection rates continue to rise and political agendas
are tragically undermining sound science.
The global health community anticipates having some 2 million people on antiretroviral treatment by the end of the
year. The World Health Organisation is promoting a target of 10 million Aids patients under treatment by 2010 independently of evidence-based medicine, because we know virtually nothing about patient outcomes.
There is a disturbing lack of medical records, and no cost-benefit analysis for each therapy has ever been done by
the WHO or its global partner agencies.
Most donors treat people because they are poor rather than because they are sick. Science has been set aside in
favour of reaching arbitrary targets as quickly and cheaply as possible, yielding numbers for politicians rather than
medical records for clinical review.
Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the United States-based Council on Foreign Relations, sees bigger lessons in the
global HIV/Aids effort's failures. With so much money that has so many strings attached, all focused on a single
disease, we are systematically hobbling low- and middle-income countries' ability to improve their overall health
systems.
The international political left has been cynically using the global Aids effort towards its own ends, particularly around
basic international drug patent rules. It advocates theft rather than partnership in drug pricing policy, and sees the
private sector as the enemy. Major non-governmental organisations, such as Oxfam, have made strange bedfellows
to further this political cause.
Oxfam and its allies are persistently working to have the military dictatorship in Thailand become the first government
to break patents on antiretroviral and other chronic disease medications. The dominoes are in place to fall, and the
impact on new Aids drug development could be devastating.
These political battles are not supported by science, and are sand in the wheels of the mechanisms necessary to
overcome HIV/Aids and every other major health threat.
The left must give up its incessant crusade against market economics; the private sector must commit to health care
improvements as a strategic investment over the long-term, not mere charity. Deals on drug pricing should not be
political footballs but fall under an agreed-upon approach which supports the rule of law, ensures safety and prevents
counterfeit products from entering the market.
The lesson of HIV/Aids is a serious warning sign about the giant potential that global public health has, for ill or for
good, depending on how we approach it. Failure to make serious progress will have enormous consequences.